COVID-19 Vaccines: RFK Jr. and the International Policy Consensus
Robert Moffit / Liana Graham /
The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the vaccine controversy is not. Concerning the jab, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ignited a firestorm with his vaccine policy, with critics condemning his changes as “irresponsible” and worse.
Kennedy’s team has reversed the Biden administration’s failing policy of promoting universal COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters. Instead, it is focusing on booster shots for older Americans and those at risk for severe illness, hospitalization, and death.
In August 2025, the Food and Drug Administration approved the COVID-19 vaccine for all Americans aged 65 and older, and for any person between age 5 and 64 with an underlying medical condition.
Team Kennedy is now no longer recommending routine COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women and healthy children. Last May, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary also announced new randomized clinical trials to determine the need for annual boosters for healthy individuals aged 6 months old to 64 years of age. Critics may complain, but there is nothing inappropriate about collecting and rigorously analyzing more data; science is not a static enterprise.
Here’s a curious fact: Many of our leading European friends and allies have adopted broadly similar policies. The “universalist” approach to COVID-19 vaccination, previously championed by the Biden administration, has made the United States a stark outlier among the economically advanced nations of the world.
While Kennedy is realigning American COVID-19 vaccine policy with that of our European friends and allies, his critics’ tacit assumption seems to be that top medical scientists in some of the world’s most advanced public health systems are “anti-vax” or somehow “irresponsible.”
In fact, prevalent European policies reflect a shared scientific consensus that continued immunization against COVID-19 should be targeted to the elderly and immunocompromised. For example, in 2025, the United Kingdom’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization recommended that, rather than a universal booster campaign, the COVID-19 vaccine should be focused on high-risk groups.
Thus, the British have determined that those eligible for continued COVID-19 vaccination include adults aged 75 years or older, or immunocompromised individuals and residents in care homes for older adults. Denmark has adopted similar COVID-19 vaccination guidelines. So have Sweden and Italy.
In France, COVID-19 vaccination is universally available and optional. But boosters are “most recommended” for people over 80 years of age, nursing home residents, and anyone who is “immunocompromised” because of an underlying medical condition. In Germany, the Federal Ministry of Health recommends boosters for all persons over the age of 60, nursing home residents, and anyone with an underlying medical condition.
Significantly, German health authorities do not recommend COVID-19 vaccination for babies, children, or adolescents without an underlying medical condition. Notably, the World Health Organization recognized that continued COVID-19 vaccination efforts are most beneficial for high-risk populations.
Perhaps congressional investigators could invite our European public health counterparts to explain why they—citing their own scientific evidence—have shifted to more targeted COVID-19 vaccine policies. The American people would benefit from such televised testimony, bringing much-needed clarity to our bitter COVID-19 vaccine debates.
Meanwhile, children, especially vulnerable infants, have become a flashpoint in the latest COVID-19 vaccine debate. The reason: A leaked “internal memo” authored by Dr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation at the FDA. According to the memo, FDA career analysts (not political appointees) sifting through the massive Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database, concluded that over the period 2021 to 2024, at least 10 children out of 96 recorded deaths died from the COVID-19 jab.
Prasad’s memo created a firestorm, and critics rolled out the big guns. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, a dozen former FDA commissioners attacked Prasad’s memo for, among other things, undermining medical innovation and public health security. Meanwhile, insisting that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe for children, Prasad’s many other critics argued that the VAERS database is devoid of crucial clinical information, and assigning childhood mortality to the vaccine is thus irresponsible.
Concerning the weakness of the VAERS database, Prasad’s critics are right. As the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic determined, VAERS is an inadequate and unreliable data source. The reason: anyone can self-report an adverse event; none of these reports are scientifically verified; and reporting any such event does not, itself, prove a causal relationship between an injection and the event.
All true.
Nonetheless, as congressional investigators have also noted, over the period 2020 to 2024, the VAERS system recorded a huge number (over 1.8 million) of adverse events—including over 38,068 deaths—attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines. Given that sheer number, plus continuing adverse reaction reports from other sources, the FDA should find out as much as possible about those ten dead kids. Even The Atlantic, a venue of elite liberal opinion, does not dismiss the possibility of children’s deaths from an adverse vaccine reaction.
The American people need clarity. After all, they’ve been battered for years by federal officials’ illegal attempts to impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates, mixed messaging, and false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness, and the failure to warn of serious myocarditis (heart inflammation) risks among the young.
Curiously, many of those who then defended Biden’s policies and practices, or turned a blind eye to the evidence, are today among Kennedy’s strongest critics. They, not Kennedy, are the ones who undermined public trust. Don’t forget that.